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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

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1. \n

   I work at a small company that has recently grown from a couple of engineers to 40+ due to some great new project opportunities. As part of this transition, many new policies are being implemented. The policies concerning the engineering department primarily revolve around task tracking and reporting time. Gone are the days when an engineer can charge eight hours to \u201cfixing stuff\u201d and earn a paycheck. Most of us are on board, but there are three engineers in particular who have been around for quite some time and vary between subtly passive aggressive to downright combative when it comes to creating JIRA tasks and logging their hours.

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   The problem? They serve an absolutely critical role in our company. They are nigh irreplaceable in an extremely niche market. How should a manager strike the perfect balance between forcing an engineer to do something that they don\u2019t want to do and not forcing them out? If this was a more common skillset, there wouldn\u2019t be an issue with telling them \u201cYou don\u2019t like it, go find another job\u201d. But when there are a handful of people in the world that do this kind of thing and it closely involves hardware and these three just happen to be local\u2026 well, you get the idea. Losing these individuals would be a staggering blow the company. Making them redundant isn\u2019t economically feasible. Time to ramp up for this position would be close to a year.

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2. \n

   So I\u2019ve recently followed the first rule of Soft Skills Engineering and quit my job. All right! I believe in the new role and I think it\u2019ll be a good change to me.

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   Despite this, I\u2019m feeling guilty about leaving my team behind. When my managers asked me how I was feeling in the last few quarters, I\u2019ve mostly said I\u2019m fine! I never told them my reservations about how the codebase I\u2019m working on has no oversight, that they need to hire another dev because I don\u2019t trust being the sole keeper, that it seems like product has forgotten this feature. I even indulged them when they asked me to make a long-term career plan when I was certain I would leave by early next year at the latest.

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   So, what\u2019s your take on how disgruntled employees often have to hide their true feelings? Maybe I could\u2019ve been open, but it really seemed like the odds were against us, it\u2019s just that upper leadership was neglecting this feature and there was no urgency to improve things. But I still feel like I wasn\u2019t being fully honest. What do you guys think?

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   Thanks so much and keep up the good work!\nFeelin\u2019 Guilty

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   P.S. Do you feel that this industry naturally rewards lack of loyalty and connection? What do you feel about that?

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